Will porn searches cost scientists $3 billion?

DES MOINES, Iowa — The ranking GOP member of the Senate Finance Committee wants Congress to reconsider new funding to the National Science Foundation amid allegations that top staffers spent long stretches of their day surfing the Internet for pornography.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to the foundation’s Office of Inspector General on Tuesday seeking all documents it has related to the inappropriate use of the foundation’s network.

The foundation is the major source of federal backing in fields such as mathematics, computer science and social sciences.

Grassley told The Associated Press on Thursday he wants Congress to reconsider $3 billion in NSF funding that is included in the current stimulus bill until his questions are answered.

First of all, Grassley deserves credit for being a watchdog in Congress, so I don’t view this as grandstanding. He’s been very active in trying to control medical costs and reign in abuse by medical researchers.

At the same time, this speaks very poorly of the recent leadership of the National Science Foundation. And it begs the question: Who is dumb enough to search for porn at work in today’s age?

16 Responses

Totally unsurprising. NSF has become a typical incompetent government bureaucracy over the years. Just look at the ridiculous research they fund and waste our tax money. It’s right up there with the private environmental lobbyist foundations in pushing useless research.

Can’t the NSF block websites? The technology’s been around for at least five years. If they aren’t using it, they deserve every bit of scorn that’s being heaped on them.

Then again, the NSF may have been blocking sites for a long time. But if Grassley can get some records of inappropriate surfing from before the blocks were put in place, 10-to-1 he’ll represent that as proof of current abuse of the NSF’s system.

I am very interested in seeing what your research turns up. In essence, the Senator is punishing the wrong people as that $3 billion is primarily for funding research proposals. The money for the proposals in addition to funding the research would provide jobs in academia for post-docs as well as funding for graduate students. The money doesn’t stay with NSF as it goes to the Universities and Institutes conducting research. The person who searched for porn at work should obviously be punished via firing, but the science community should not suffer as a whole. It is hard enough to get funding for anything other than bio-medical or global warming projects as it is!

I am not surprised at all. let’s face it here you have a group of people who call themselves scientists. These are the people who are out to destroy the US economy through a conspiracy over a 100 years in the making where they are using made up temperature measurements to redistribute US wealth to communist Europe.

These are the same scientists Tyler so helpfully pinted out that created the holocaust, the atom bomb, guns, explosives, the electric chair.

What websites did they think these people would visit? HelloKitty.com?

Just to be clear, the people reportedly looking at porn were NSF staffers, not scientists. The NSF administers funding for basic research, but doesn’t conduct it directly. The work is usually done at universities.

The staffers under scrutiny were certainly acting unprofessionally and should be reprimanded or fired. But the NSF is a gem among federal programs: it funds high risk long-term research that no private company would be capable of supporting. Historically basic research pays off enormously, but the return time is very long.

The occasional news reports on ridiculous research topics usually fail to give context for the work. Even when news reports are accurate, high-risk research has to involve occasional missteps.

In my opinion, the long-term return on NSF spending is orders of magnitude greater than what we’ll get back on military, entitlement, or even NIH spending.